Digital Commons Network^™

Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization And The Making Of Veteran Identity, Tracy L. Barnett

Civil War Book Review

Bradley R. Clampitt explores the “emotional lives” of Confederates as they transitioned from soldiers to civilians in Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity. Reviewer Tracy L. Barnett writes that by using a large sample of sources including letters, journals, and questionnaires collected from Tennessee soldiers who fought in all the war’s theaters, Clampitt reveals “the Confederate mindset and details the on-the-ground process of southern demobilization” as the soldiers moved from the battlefront to the homefront.

Dosing Discrimination: Regulating Pdmp Risk Scores, Jennifer D. Oliva

Faculty Scholarship

Prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) predictive surveillance platforms were designed for-and funded by-law enforcement agencies. PDMPs use proprietary algorithms to determine a patient's risk for prescription drug misuse, diversion, and overdose. The proxies that PDMPs utilize to calculate patient risk scores likely produce artificially inflated scores for marginalized patients, including women and racial minorities with complex, pain­ related conditions; poor, uninsured, under-insured, and rural individuals; and patients with co-morbid disabilities or diseases, including substance use disorder and mental health conditions. Law enforcement conducts dragnet sweeps of PDMP data to target providers that the platform characterizes as "overprescribers" and patients that …

The Relationship Between New Foreign Direct Investment And U.S. All Industry Sales, Sherron Alexander Jackson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In the global production network, multinational corporations can squeeze domestic firms out of local markets. Nationally, economic developers are concerned about all industry sales as a symbol of the economic advantages featured in regional business production. Grounded in ownership, location, and internalization theory, the purpose of this ex post facto study was to examine the relationship between (a) new foreign direct investment (NFDI) for acquisition projects, (b) NFDI for greenfield establishment projects, (c) NFDI for greenfield expansion projects, and (d) all industry sales in the United States. Data were collected from the 2019 U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) archival …

International Expansion Strategies For Small Businesses, May Alkhudari

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small businesses in the United States struggle to globalize and compete in a globalized economy, which diminishes their growth and investment opportunities. Small business owners in the United States struggle to expand their business globally due to the lack of information, which limits their profitability. Grounded in Porter's five forces theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore small retail business owners' strategies to improve their profitability opportunities through global expansion. The participants were five small retail business owners in the Northeast region of the United States who successfully expanded their business internationally. Data were collected …

Talent Management Strategies For Managing Employee Career Advancement At Fortune 500 Companies, Kimberly Chennel Burke

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The focus on attracting talent versus an internal focus on advancing talented employees has become costly for corporations. Senior leaders at Fortune 500 companies need to advance the careers of internal employees to achieve their business objectives. Grounded in the path-goal theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to explore the talent management (TM) strategies senior leaders at Fortune 500 companies use to manage the career advancement of internal employees. Methodological triangulation was used to analyze data collected from semistructured interviews and company documentation. The participants were six Fortune 500 leaders in the United States Midwest region who …

Elementary Teacher Perceptions Of Blended Learning In The Digital Classroom, Sarah Cummings

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Blended learning is an instructional model in which instruction is delivered using a combination of traditional teaching methods and online learning materials such as digital textbooks, virtual textbooks, and teacher-made videos. The problem was that elementary teachers in local schools were not implementing blended learning as intended by the school’s improvement plan. The purpose of this study was to examine the perspectives of elementary teachers in Grades 3-5 who have experience using blended learning. The framework for the study is the complex adaptive blended learning system (CABLS) because it helps examine the blended learning elements and the changes that result …

Nursing Faculty Experiences With Interactive Games And Gaming And Student Preparedness, Laura S. Dana

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Although instructional strategies to enhance student learning is a critical component of the faculty role, nursing education has been slow to incorporate games and gaming into the learning environment. The primary purpose for this qualitative phenomenological research study was to explore the lived experiences of nursing faculty of associate degree programs, specifically regarding the use of games and gaming as interactive, experiential teaching and learning strategies. This study was designed to answer the question, “What are the lived experiences of faculty who use games and gaming as instructional approaches in associate degree nursing (ADN) education.” Through one-on-one interviews via Zoom …

Motivational Strategies Warehouse Managers Use To Improve Employees’ Performance, Brooks Latonya Demming

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Failure to improve employee performance can have unfavorable organizational outcomes. Organizational leaders are concerned about employee performance because improving employee performance is critical for achieving organizational goals. Grounded in Vroom’s expectancy theory of motivation, the purpose of this multiple-case study was to explore strategies warehouse managers use to improve employees’ performance. Data were collected using semistructured interviews with three warehouse managers, member-checking interviews, and a review of public company documents. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Three themes emerged: organizational communication, employee empowerment, and a supportive work environment. A key recommendation for warehouse managers is to communicate expectations to employees …

Factors That Influenced Post-Secondary Faculty Members' Use Of A D2l Learning Management System, Nadia Navene Edmondson-Kelly

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In 2019, the college administrators at a large 2-year college located in Canada implemented a Learning Management System (LMS) policy for all instructors. The goal of the LMS policy was for faculty members to demonstrate committed professionalism and high degree of competence in teaching. The problem was that instructors underutilized the LMS to provide feedback to students, make course content available in a variety of accessible formats to students, and promote student engagement in learning. In this study, the factors that influenced instructors’ use of the LMS in accordance with the LMS usage policy were explored. The expanded technology acceptance …

Leaders’ Strategies For Accommodating Flexible Work Arrangements To Retain Employees Post-Covid-19, Tracy Eubanks

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

As the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic subside, business leaders are concerned about retaining employees. Business leaders are concerned with employee retention, as replacing an employee can be costly and erode profitability. Grounded in McGregor's theory X and theory Y, the purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore strategies five first-line leaders in one organization in the Southwest United States used to retain employees who wanted to continue flexible work arrangements post-COVID-19. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and a review of the participants’ corporate websites about the future of the workplace. The three themes that emerged …

First-Generation Academically At-Risk Black College Students' Perceptions Of Borrowing And Repayment Of Student Loans, Tianna Gordon

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Escalating college costs have far-reaching implications, especially for low-income and first-generation students. Lack of financial literacy can negatively affect the success of these learners and may have long-lasting consequences, yet there is a lack of literature about the borrowing and repayment obligations related to student loans of first-generation, academically at-risk Black students. Grounded in social cognitive theory and human capital theory, the purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore first-generation academically at-risk Black college students' understanding of student loan borrowing and repayment obligations. A semistructured interview protocol with open-ended questions was used to obtain the narrative data from …

A Process Evaluation Of Intelligence Gathering Using Social Media For Emergency Management Organizations In California, Alan Barner

Master's Projects

When responding to an emergency, correct and timely information is often the difference between a successful response and a potential disaster. The information that emergency managers in California receive from the public often dictates how agencies respond to emergencies. The emergence of social media has presented several benefits to emergency managers regarding intelligence gathering during the emergency response process. Simultaneously, the emergence of social media has raised several concerns for the stakeholders involved. One major issue involves inaccurate information circulating on social media platforms during ongoing disasters. If emergency managers cannot discern incorrect information from correct information, disaster response may …

Evaluating The Entrepreneurship Ecosystem In Stockton, California, Angelina Abella

Master's Projects

In any community, entrepreneurs and small business owners play an important role in the fabric of the community. The concept of “community wealth-building” is the idea that cooperatives, Community Development Financial Institutes (CDFIs), impact investors, and local governments, can “...strengthen locally-rooted and locally-held businesses and investing vehicles…” (Field, 2015, n.p.). It is believed that keeping businesses local results in “...more local tax revenue, more local business activity and more local employment” (Field, 2015, n.p.).

Therefore, supporting an entrepreneur may contribute to the overall quality of life of the community by supporting them, their families, and their employees. This can be …

Gesture Recognition Using Neural Networks, Ashwini Kurady

Master's Projects

The advances in technology have brought in a lot of changes in the way humans go about their lives. This has enhanced the significance of Artificial Neural Networks and Computer Vision- based interactions with the world. Gesture Recognition is one of the major focus areas in Computer Vision. This involves Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) that would capture and understand human actions. In this project, we will explore how Neural Network concepts can be applied in this challenging field of Computer Vision. By leveraging the latest research for Gesture Recognition, we researched on how to capture the movement across different frames …

Poriferal Vision: Deep Transfer Learning-Based Sponge Spicules Identification & Taxonomic Classification, Sudhin Domala

Master's Projects

The phylum Porifera includes the aquatic organisms known as sponges. Sponges are classified into four classes: Calcarea, Hexactinellida, Demospongiae, and Homoscleromorpha. Within Demospongiae and Hexactinellida, sponges’ skeletons are needle-like spicules made of silica. With a wide variety of shapes and sizes, these siliceous spicules’ morphology plays a pivotal role in assessing and understanding sponges' taxonomic diversity and evolution. In marine ecosystems, when sponges die their bodies disintegrate over time, but their spicules remain in the sediments as fossilized records that bear ample taxonomic information to reconstruct the evolution of sponge communities and sponge phylogeny.

Traditional methods of identifying spicules from …

Hidden Markov Models With Momentum, Andrew Miller

Master's Projects

Momentum is a popular technique for improving convergence rates during gradient descent. In this research, we experiment with adding momentum to the Baum-Welch expectation-maximization algorithm for training Hidden Markov Models. We compare discrete Hidden Markov Models trained with and without momentum on English text and malware opcode data. The effectiveness of momentum is determined by measuring the changes in model score and classification accuracy due to momentum. Experiments indicate that adding momentum to Baum-Welch can reduce the number of iterations required for initial convergence during HMM training, particularly in cases where the model is slow to converge. However, momentum does …

Faking Sensor Noise Information, Justin Chang

Master's Projects

Noise residue detection in digital images has recently been used as a method to classify images based on source camera model type. The meteoric rise in the popularity of using Neural Network models has also been used in conjunction with the concept of noise residuals to classify source camera models. However, many papers gloss over the details on the methods of obtaining noise residuals and instead rely on the self- learning aspect of deep neural networks to implicitly discover this themselves. For this project I propose a method of obtaining noise residuals (“noiseprints”) and denoising an image, as well as …

Modeling Sequencing Artifacts For Next Generation Sequencing, Yvonna Leung

Master's Projects

Advancements in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) have enabled detection of genetic alterations at large scales with high throughputs. NGS offers advantages over the established sequencing method, Sanger sequencing, by processing large sections of the genome simultaneously at a lower cost with higher accuracy. However, recent research has shown that sequencing artifacts are introduced at various steps in the NGS workflow. These artifacts are the result of an accumulation of errors from multiple steps, such as library preparation and downstream processes, and can result in variants being identified that aren’t actually present in the sequenced genome. Therefore, there is a need …

Cloud Provisioning And Management With Deep Reinforcement Learning, Alexandru Tol

Master's Projects

The first web applications appeared in the early nineteen nineties. These applica- tions were entirely hosted in house by companies that developed them. In the mid 2000s the concept of a digital cloud was introduced by the then CEO of google Eric Schmidt. Now in the current day most companies will at least partially host their applications on proprietary servers hosted at data-centers or commercial clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Heroku.

This arrangement seems like a straight forward win-win for both parties, the customer gets rid of the hassle of maintaining a live server for their applications and …

Multi-Step Prediction Using Tree Generation For Reinforcement Learning, Kevin Prakash

Master's Projects

The goal of reinforcement learning is to learn a policy that maximizes a reward function. In some environments with complete information, search algorithms are highly useful in simulating action sequences in a game tree. However, in many practical environments, such effective search strategies are not applicable since their state transition information may not be available. This paper proposes a novel method to approximate a game tree that enables reinforcement learning to use search strategies even in incomplete information environments. With an approximated game tree, the agent predicts all possible states multiple steps into the future and evaluates the states to …

Graph Neural Networks For Malware Classification, Vrinda Malhotra

Master's Projects

Malware is a growing threat to the digital world. The first step to managing this threat is malware detection and classification. While traditional techniques rely on static or dynamic analysis of malware, the generation of these features requires expert knowledge. Function call graphs (FCGs) consist of program functions as their nodes and their interprocedural calls as their edges, providing a wealth of knowledge that can be utilized to classify malware without feature extraction that requires experts. This project treats malware classification as a graph classification problem, setting node features using the Local Degree Profile (LDP) model and using different graph …

Adversarial Attacks On Android Malware Detection And Classification, Srilekha Nune

Master's Projects

Recent years have seen an increase in sales of intelligent gadgets, particularly those using the Android operating system. This popularity has not gone unnoticed by malware writers. Consequently, many research efforts have been made to develop learning models that can detect Android malware. As a countermeasure, malware writers can consider adversarial attacks that disrupt the training or usage of such learning models. In this paper, we train a wide variety of machine learning models using the KronoDroid Android malware dataset, and we consider adversarial attacks on these models. Specifically, we carefully measure the decline in performance when the feature sets …

Using Machine Learning To Maximize First-Generation Student Success A Contribution To The Mission Of Aiding The Underserved, Mustafa Emre Yesilyurt

Master's Projects

The Leadership and Career Accelerator (UNVS 101) is a course offered at San José State University (SJSU) designed to hone industry skills in and provide support to students of underserved backgrounds. The main goal of this study is to determine which features are most significant to identifying the students at risk of failing the course. This will allow faculty to better focus data collection efforts and facilitate an increase in classifier accuracy. The data came as three distinct sets (sources). One contained features describing student demographics and academic history, another described the students’ experience in the course, and a third …

The Impact Of Bisphenol A And Its Analogues On Neurodevelopmental Transcriptomes In Drosophila Melanogaster, An Nguyen

Master's Projects

Bisphenol A (BPA) is an endocrine-disrupting compound (EDC) that can act as an agonist or antagonist to interfere with multiple signaling pathways, including neurological pathways. The impact of BPA related to neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) is one of the biggest concerns in BPA exposure in humans. Therefore, BPA analogues are used to replace BPA in manufacturing and BPA-free products. However, most BPA analogues, including Bisphenol F (BPF) and Bisphenol S (BPS), act the same way as BPA on estrogen and androgen receptors. RNASequencing (RNA-seq) analysis was used to investigate the impact of BPA, BPF, and BPS on neurodevelopmental transcriptomes in Drosophila …

Mrna-Sequencing Pipeline And Pathway Analysis To Determine The Effects Of Bisphenol A On Fragile X Syndrome In Drosophila Melanogaster, Rashi Raghulan

Master's Projects

Neurological disorders (NDDs), like Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), are becoming more prevalent. One outstanding question in the field is how genetic risk factors for NDDs, like Fmr1, converge with environmental risk factors like bisphenol A (BPA). Our research compares and contrasts the different molecular impacts of BPA exposure in wild-type and FXS flies using mRNA-sequencing analysis. This analysis identifies the mutation in the Fmr1 gene is shown to have a stronger effect on the Drosophila than the presence of BPA, resulting in significant differential gene expression that perturbed several neurological pathways. Moreover, numerous genes responsible for genetic human diseases have …

An Investigation Of Segmental Duplications Across Topologically Associating Domains, Sara Bell

Master's Projects

High-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) reveals organization within genomes. Topologically associating domains (TADs) make up one level of organization and are identified by applying algorithms to Hi-C data. TADs have boundaries disrupted by structural variants (SVs), hypothesized to form due to recombination that occurs between segmental duplications (SDs). Little research is available about the effects of SDs at TAD boundaries. This project aimed to understand the distribution of SDs near TADs and determine any overlap between the two features. We analyzed public data and found SDs to have low breakpoint frequency and coverage at TAD boundaries. We then processed a …

A Study On Human Face Expressions Using Convolutional Neural Networks And Generative Adversarial Networks, Sriramm Muthyala Sudhakar

Master's Projects

Human beings express themselves via words, signs, gestures, and facial emotions. Previous research using pre-trained convolutional models had been done by freezing the entire network and running the models without the use of any image processing techniques. In this research, we attempt to enhance the accuracy of many deep CNN architectures like ResNet and Senet, using a variety of different image processing techniques like Image Data Generator, Histogram Equalization, and UnSharpMask. We used FER 2013, which is a dataset containing multiple classes of images. While working on these models, we decided to take things to the next level, and we …

The U.S. Plastics Problem: The Road To Circularity, Ruth Jebe

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Plastics pollution has been an issue in the United States since discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch catapulted it to the forefront of news reporting. Regulatory and academic activity around plastics has had a common feature: it focused almost exclusively on one stage in plastics’ linear model and framed the problem as a waste problem. Challenges have come in two forms: the shift from the linear production model of take-make-waste to a sustainability paradigm represented by the concept of circular production, and disruption of the global plastics waste supply chain occasioned by changes in China’s waste import policies. These …

Consideration Sets As Resources For Business Model Generation, E. Shaunn Mattingly, Garrett A. Mcbrayer

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Business models as outcomes for entrepreneurship are increasing in prevalence in pedagogy and practice. Instructors and entrepreneurs are focusing efforts on iterating potential ideas through a process of trial and error in hopes to produce working business models. However, such practices need to be better underpinned by theory so we can develop an understanding of how to identify more valuable opportunity ideas and how to progress them towards working business models with fewer trials and errors. This conceptual paper focuses on integrating extant conceptualisations of business models as interdependent activities with research on identifying opportunities as problem-solution pairings. While integrating …

Undocumented First-Generation Hispanic Adolescents, Acculturative Stressors, And Academic Performance, Maria Inez Acuna

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Research on the acculturative stressors affecting the academic performance of undocumented first-generation Hispanic adolescents is very limited. The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experiences of undocumented first-generation Hispanic adolescents enrolled in a U.S. middle school and the effects of acculturative stressors on their academic performance. To better understand the effects of acculturative stressors, Bandura’s social learning theory and Berry’s theory of acculturative stress were the theoretical foundations for the study. Seven participants from Mexico and Honduras answered four questions from a semi structured interview protocol. Data analysis included Epoché bracketing, horizonalization, clustering into themes, textural description …